The winner of the 2024 ASN Presidential Award, chosen from among all of the papers published in The American Naturalist in 2023, is “Evolution of a Mosquito’s Hatching Behavior to Match Its Human-Provided Habitat” by Hillery C. Metz, Alexandra K. Miller, Janet You, Jewelna Akorli, Frank W. Avila, Eva A. Buckner, Philomina Kane, Samson Otoo, Alongkot Ponlawat, Omar Triana-Chávez, Katie F. Williams, and Carolyn S. McBride.
This paper truly exemplifies the American Society of Naturalists’ goal of the conceptual unification of the biological sciences, with results of both fundamental and applied importance. The key result is that a subspecies of the yellow fever mosquito has recently evolved to be locally adapted to water containers made by humans rather than the ancestral tree hole habitat. In tree holes mosquito egg hatching is cued by declining oxygen concentration caused by increasing populations of their bacterial food, but egg hatching in the recently evolved subspecies occurs at the higher oxygen concentrations found in artificial water containers. The paper combines geographically widespread sampling, genetics, a common garden design, and detailed laboratory and field experiments. It also has a very diverse set of authors, including several undergraduates and collaborators from Africa, Asia, and South America.
